Maybe what’s at work is a kind of interior slut-shaming—if I suggest that such a damaging moment was the cause of my sexual activeness, then I disavow any good feelings I might have around my own sexuality. In other words, victimhood came to shape my own concept of my sexuality. When I sat down to write a memoir of my adolescent sex life, for

Sex addicts who were not abused as children may have had more subtle forms of sexualization projected on them by a parent or they may have felt so unloved or undesirable that they now look to sexual contact as a quick source of comfort.